While it's a bit more difficult to make milk chocolate at home, making pure chocolate (or something similar to what you know as "dark chocolate") at home is very doable.
You need to pick up a package or two of raw cocoa beans, sugar, and mint flavoring. Also have on hand a mortar-and-pestle and pepper mill. The process begins by roasting the beans. So spread the beans out in a single layer on a pan. Set the oven to 400 and leave them in the oven for about half an hour. After 30 minutes, take them out and allow them to cool. Now peel off the husks (the hardest part of the process).
Next, you'll want to break them up. Spreading them out on a tea towel, placing another over top and using a hammer will work, but possibly too well. A more restrained and easy to control way of breaking them into pieces is with a mortar and pestle. Once you have pieces, put them in a clean pepper or other mill and grind them. It is very important that you grind just to the point where you can put them back in a dish, and not to the point that they turn to liquid.
If you've done everything right, you should have brown mush. Heat this in a pan of water. Then grind it a bit more in the mortar. Now add some mint and sugar (1/2 cup per pound of beans). Pour this into molds and voila! Hey! You are done with making yummy CHOCOLATE!
While it's a bit more difficult to make milk chocolate at home, making pure chocolate (or something similar to what you know as "dark chocolate") at home is very doable.
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Roberto Garabell
